with George Martin on the accompany- ing CDs, so you can make your own de- ductions from there. It's not inconceiv- able, to use the double negative, that they might decide to have some new songs in the collection as well. But it's too early to know for sure." Nell Aspinall, who runs Apple Corps, will only say, "There's still nothing firm." Whether going back into the studio together will alter the Beatles' legacy re- mains to be seen. But in any case, the release of the "Anthology" videos and their accompanying CDs promises to be a major cultural event. One reason that the former Beatles are now able to work together agaIn, ac- cording to Derek Taylor, who was the press officer for the Beatles and is now a consultant at Apple Corps, is simply the passage of time. "All three of them have done Beatles songs in concerts," he saId. "It becomes comfortable for every- body. They have reclaimed their own history, and with that any embarrass- ment evaporates, and a lot of things that once seemed difficult become easy." An- other important factor is that the vari- ous lawsuits that had been pitting the Beatles against EMI since the seventies and against one another since the eight- Ies have been resolved The "Anthology" project may actu- ally turn out to be a three-pronged en- deavor. In addition to the CDs, the video series may be accompanied by a companion book. The video coverage will begin in 1940, when both John Lennon and Ringo Starr were born, and extend until 1970. The Beatles are in- terviewed separately, with questions be- ing posed off-camera by the British tele- vision personality Jools Holland, who was formerly the keyboardist for the pop group Squeeze. These contemporary in- terviews will be interspersed with pho- tographs and film footage from the era, including materials drawn from the Beatles' private collections. Each of the surviving Beatles, and Y oko Ono as well, must approve the final version of the story. For his part, George Martin worries slightly about the enormous public ex- pectations of the Beatles. "One must be very selective" in releasing archival ma- terial, Martin says, adding that he is not inclined to put out "everything they did, warts and all." One selection he does fa- vor releasing is Take 1 of "Strawberry Fields Forever," which he has said is "well worth people hearing now." During an interview at his AlR Stu- dios building in North London, I ask Martin about an unreleased take of George Harrison's 'While My Guitar Gently Weeps," which a bootleg-collector friend had played for me. It is the first recorded take of the song, and it is plaintive and spare. Virtually the only sounds on it are Harrison's acoustic gui- tar and his aching, meditative vocal. It includes a last verse, later dropped, in which the singer, resigned to the idea that the world will go its own way no matter how he may wish to awaken "the love there that's sleeping," finally moves beyond mourning to acceptance. It's a spine-tingling performance, made all the more poignant by its contrast with the electric version on "The Beatles" (better known as "The White Album") featuring Eric Clapton's shimmering lead guitar. "I've got no problem with that," Martin says when I ask if he would con- sider releasing it. "The important thing is to get the aspects of each of these things right. The trouble is, the Beatles got to be so damn big that if you were to issue anything like that it would be construed as another gem. It would be like now discovering an unrevealed manuscript of Bach, almost-without being too pretentious-and people would therefore expect a great deal of it. And, if it were less than bloody perfect, people would say, 'Oh, I knew they , d ' " weren t so goo . Martin will certainly have a great deal of archival material to choose from. The Beatles released only ten and a half hours of music-the contents of the group's twenty-two singles and thirteen albums-during their eight-year studio career. Yet the tapes inside the Abbey Road archives, it turns out, contain more than four hundred hours' worth of Beatles recordings. The collection extends from June 6, 1962, which is the date of the audition that narrowly persuaded George Martin to sign the Beatles, to January 4, 1970, when Paul, George, and Ringo Gohn was in Denmark on holiday) recorded the final overdubs for the group's fare- well album, "Let It Be." In between are the tapes of everything else, stored in red-and-white cardboard boxes the size of large telephone books. Pick a favor- 83 ite Beatles song; the archives hold not only the master tape of that song as it is heard on the album but also the work- ing tapes that trace the song's evolution from its first run-through to its polished final version. There are also lots of off- the-cuff jam sessions, arguments, horse- play, and studio chat, as well as a few songs that the general public has never heard. Because the tapes are irreplaceable and, in effect, priceless, EMI quietly transferred them from an underground vault in West London to their own separate archives a couple of years ago to safeguard them against theft and un- authorized copying. The door to the ar- chives is intentionally nondescript, the sort of door a person would walk rIght past without thinking twice. Security is so tight that EMI's own Beatles archi- vist, a researcher and writer named Mark Lewisohn, is not allowed inside the archives room. In order to play se- lections from the archives for me dur- ing a visit to Abbey Road, Lewisohn had to send a fax days in advance list- ing the specific tapes we wished to hear. The tapes were delivered to an assigned studio in the morning and returned to the vault in the evening. In all, Lewisohn and I spent six days at Abbey Road listening to archives tapes of the Beatles and of the solo work of John Lennon. Lewisohn is the only person except the Beatles (and their producers and engineers) who has heard all four hundred-plus hours of recordings in the archives. A thirty-five-year-old former finance clerk for the BBC and later a freelance music writer, he was granted this privilege in 1987, when EMI asked him to review all the tapes in the ar- chives and catalogue their contents. For Lewisohn, who had been a devoted Beatles fan since the age of four and a half: when his mother played him their first No. 1 single, "Please Please Me," and told him that "these boys are going to go a long way," it was a joy beyond description. Lewisohn's immersion in the ar- chives resulted in a book called "The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions." Published in 1988, it is an indispensable companion for anyone wishing to un- derstand how the Beatles worked in the studio. Virtually every page adds some- thing new to the public record. Based